[The number is n]ot six-six-six, but six hundred sixty-six, which in Roman, Greek, or Hebrew numerals is not written as three sixes. (For example, in Roman numerals, 6 = VI and 666 = DCLXVI.)

And in some manuscripts of the New Testament, the number is given as 616.

Hebrew, Greek, and Roman numerals consist of letters from each respective language's alphabet. Especially in Hebrew and Greek, ordinary words can be assigned numerical values. You can do that with Roman numerals if you simply skip the letters that are not numerals, which are many....

Macomber: Maybe for you. I spent the day defending myself against various pestilence and demonic appariations. I'm still picking locust out of my air conditioner fan, bandaging gashes from giant half-man/half-scorpion creatures and trying to vacuum the rest of the crumbs from the broken seals up before my wife gets home from work.

Nothing at all strange happened where you're at? I guess Boston must have collectively been a bad, bad boy this year....

Anyone? Anyone? In his continuing efforts to dominate media, history, and the world, Bill Clinton has taken time out of his busy, busy schedule to record his own voice (“chuckles” and all) and recount his own personal memories of being president for visitors to the Clinton Library in Little Rock/>, Arkansas/>/>.

For just $3 extra, you too can hear Bill wax on enthusiastically about his most cherished and personal memories of being president (Monica didn’t make the cut), and his childhood, and his initiatives, and his life in general.

For those of you worried that independence for Montenegro would set off a chain reaction of ornery separatism, may I present the US and EU's major-league neg of a copycat referendum for the infamous Republika Srpska. Kosovo, of course, is well on its way to full breakaway status -- but here Montenegrin independence serves as a cherry on top, not a catalyst, of an unfinished ordeal over a decade in the making.

Now if only someone could bring an orderly Balkanization to Somalia. or Sudan. Or Iraq. Or...

I nominate Indian novelist Arundhati Roy. She has all the requirements: impoverished upbringing (or so the story goes) in India/>, an attractive woman, a bestselling author, and an unrepentant and unhinged critic of the West and the U.S./>/> in particular. Her career was nicely summarized by one newspaper, which said that she proved “that you can be a political radical and look like a million dollars at parties.” And the title of her bestselling novel, The God of Small Things, is a nice distillation of the U.N. Secretary General’s position.

There have been many, but one deserves special mention. In the Taipei Times, written by Doug Bandow who was forced to resign from the Cato Institute for being paid to write opinion columns by Jack Abramoff. It's nice to see Bandow has obtained political asylum in Taiwan.

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